“What will you do?” she whispered.

“What will I do?” repeated Lingard, gently.  “Oh, yes—­do.  Mrs. Travers, do you see that I am nothing now?  Just nothing.”

He had lost himself in the contemplation of her face turned to him with an expression of awed curiosity.  The shock of the world coming down about his ears in consequence of Carter’s smartness was so terrific that it had dulled his sensibilities in the manner of a great pain or of a great catastrophe.  What was there to look at but that woman’s face, in a world which had lost its consistency, its shape, and its promises in a moment?

Mrs. Travers looked away.  She understood that she had put to Lingard an impossible question.  What was presenting itself to her as a problem was to that man a crisis of feeling.  Obviously Carter’s action had broken the compact entered into with Daman, and she was intelligent enough to understand that it was the sort of thing that could not be explained away.  It wasn’t horror that she felt, but a sort of consternation, something like the discomfiture of people who have just missed their train.  It was only more intense.  The real dismay had yet to make its way into her comprehension.  To Lingard it was a blow struck straight at his heart.

He was not angry with Carter.  The fellow had acted like a seaman.  Carter’s concern was for the ships.  In this fatality Carter was a mere incident.  The real cause of the disaster was somewhere else, was other, and more remote.  And at the same time Lingard could not defend himself from a feeling that it was in himself, too, somewhere in the unexplored depths of his nature, something fatal and unavoidable.  He muttered to himself: 

“No.  I am not a lucky man.”

This was but a feeble expression of the discovery of the truth that suddenly had come home to him as if driven into his breast by a revealing power which had decided that this was to be the end of his fling.  But he was not the man to give himself up to the examination of his own sensations.  His natural impulse was to grapple with the circumstances and that was what he was trying to do; but he missed now that sense of mastery which is half the battle.  Conflict of some sort was the very essence of his life.  But this was something he had never known before.  This was a conflict within himself.  He had to face unsuspected powers, foes that he could not go out to meet at the gate.  They were within, as though he had been betrayed by somebody, by some secret enemy.  He was ready to look round for that subtle traitor.  A sort of blankness fell on his mind and he suddenly thought:  “Why!  It’s myself.”

Immediately afterward he had a clear, merciless recollection of Hassim and Immada.  He saw them far off beyond the forests.  Oh, yes, they existed—­within his breast!